Comment on Steam Machine
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days agoWell, my Steam collection isn’t all that big (I mostly buy from GoG) plus I’ve only changed to Linux about 6 months ago, so out of the 6 Steam games I have tried so far in Linux, only for 1 (The Sims3, an EA game from 2009) has it failed to run from Steam whilst a pirated version ran perfectly fine with Lutris and Wine.
If I remember it correctly since the very beginning this game was problematic even in Windows because of its excessive DRM and if you look at ProtonDB, most recent experiences reported with the Sims 3 are either negative or problematic.
I’ve tweaked a lot of problematic games to get them to run in Linux (mainly GoG games with Wine and Lutris, though one of the 6 Steam games I’vbe tried require tweaking in Steam to get it to run) plus I know enough about tweaking Wine to get pirated games to run in Lutris (Lutris doesn’t have install scripts for downloaded “releases” like that, so they often requires tracking in the logs the missing DLLs and figuring which version to install or even if the problem requires forcing use of the native DLL in WINEDLLOVERRIDES) so it’s not as if by now I’m devoid of experience at tweaking that stuff.
In summary, my total rate for problems running Steam games under Linux is 33.3%, half of which I could solve with tweaking and half I could not, though it’s a pretty small sample so the error margin is large.
For comparison sake, with Wine and Lutris out of maybe 20 games, looking at my notes - because I write the tweaks down for future reference - 5 required tweaking (so around 25%) and only for 1 of those (10% off the total) I failed to get it to run properly.
Compared to the last time I tried gaming on Linux (maybe a decade ago), it’s incredibly good.
scutiger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If GOG is your main platform, have you tried Heroic launcher? You can log in to your GOG account with it and it will keep track of your library and can be set up to auto-update like Steam if you wish, and you can set it up to run everything through Proton and has a bunch of workarounds built-in.
I personally had a lot of issues with Lutris, so I gave up on it some time ago, even though people seem to swear by it.
I’ve been blown away by the difference. Gaming would have been the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux full-time, and the only games that I know for sure won’t work are games that I have no interest in playing anyway.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I can log into my GOG account with Lutris and it will NOT auto-update my games but rather works as a pull-only manager, which I prefer since over 2 decades in Software Engineering have taught me that shit getting updated at the convenience of a 3rd party is a great way to randomly and for no good reason have stuff that works stop working. Even in Windows I refused to use GOG Galaxy for exactly that reason and kept downloading offline installers (and that’s also part of the reason I favored GOG over Steam). You could say it’s a professional quirk 😀
I’m definitely one of those people who swears by Lutris and even went to the trouble of figuring out how to run games from it automatically sandboxed and have mine configured to run them with Firejail set for, amongst other things, no network access (it looked into it because I wanted to make sure any pirated game wouldn’t hack my system, but it also works well to stop official versions of games from doing any funny business - mainly privacy invasive stuff - so I have it set up as default for all games).
I too was holding back from having Linux as my main by the lack of availability of games that would run on Linux - and I’ve been playing around with Linux and even using it professionally since the early 90s - so I’m very happy with how this transition from Windows to Linux turned out for me and, like you, almost all of the games that I know won’t work are games I don’t have interest in playing anyway (mainly because the Online Multiplayer experience for AAA games nowadays is horrible even when compared to the 2000s and early 2010s, worse compared to LAN gaming in the 90s).